No gap, no yap.
I heard a great saying the other day:
If no gap, no yap
The context was in deciding the review cycle that we wanted to put in place for business sufficiency checks across regions. The statement was meant to capture the philosophy that if a region did not have a gap vs. aligned objectives then there should not even be a meeting.
I liked this simple summarization alot as it goes beyond just saying that “meetings should have an objective” and lines up more with how I think about accountability and project review meetings in general.
Empowerment
One of the aspects of “no gap, no yap” that resonated with me most strongly is that it inherently empowers the team doing the work.
In many cases it feels like “review meetings” are set up to police people doing work - but that is often not an effective use of time. The people doing the policing, while well intentioned, are often less directly connected to the actual problem or business which can lead to either superficial questions or probing in areas that are complex but well understood and being handled by the project team. However the project team may spend significant time preparing for the review so nets a negative ROI on the interaction.
Instead, oversight efforts should be focused on establishing very clear success measures and then getting out of the way of the project team. Meetings can then be triggered if:
- Project team requests help
- Project team indiciates need to revisit success criteria
- There is indication that project team is off-track vs. success criteria
Without one of the above triggers generalized review meetings should be avoided.
Requirements
For this to work the following must exist:
- Clear objectives for a team
- Ability to measure progress vs. team objectives
- Management trust of team
- Team’s belief that asking for help will not be seen as failure
In many cases not enough time is spent on success metric creation and can result in creating KPIs that can not even be reasonably measured. This leads to a destructive cycle where management is not able to view team progress vs. goal and instead requires reviewing tactical execution. This ultimately creates a micro-management arranagement that removes team empowerment and reduces team’s likeliness to ask for help when they actually need it.
Ideally a team’s progress is can be viewed with no additional team effort (i.e. via automated dashboards, etc.). If not then team should provide an aligned, scheduled scorecard with KPI results. Out of cycle requests for KPIs should be avoided.
Where not to apply “NG,NY” philosophy
There are a lot of meetings where a “no gap, no yap” philosophy probably should not be applied - in particular meetings that are not outcome oriented and/or are not measureable by nature. Examples would include things like 1-1 manager meetings, deployment meetings and innovation brain-storming meetings where there is value in the connection and conversation.